February ii, 1891.] 



Garden and Forest. 



63 



not many left the attic alive, but died on and around the 

 windows. 



This bureau of which I speak stood in this house on the 

 second floor just beneath the attic. It is veneered on all sides 

 except the back, where possibly a mother beetle might have 

 gained access. It is eleven years since it was removed, and if 

 we conclude that the eggs were left then by one of these attic 

 beetles, it must have taken them nine or ten years at least to 

 come to maturity. 



Vineiand, N.J. Mary Treat. 



Lenoir's " Elysee." 



SOON after the National Assembly took control of affairs in 

 France it charged its " Committee of Alienation " to see 

 that all works of art contained in buildings which had been 

 declared national property should be preserved and properly 

 cared for. In consequence a " Monument Commission" was 

 formed of artists and savants ; the Maison des Petits Augustins, 

 in a street of the same name in Paris, was set apart for the re- 

 ception of works of sculpture and painting, and other confis- 

 cated monastic houses were appropriated for books, manu- 

 scripts and minor works of art. In the year 1791 Alexandre 

 Lenoir, a young man of good education who had studied to 

 be a painter, was appointed curator of the museum. The 

 work of filling it was begun and completed by him, but when 

 he died, in 1839, it had long been a tiling of the past. After 

 the Restoration, in 1817, his "Museum of French Historical 

 Monuments" was suppressed, and its contents were either re- 

 turned to their original homes or, in most cases, transferred 

 to the Louvre, the Ecole des Beaux Arts or Pere-la-Chaise. 

 But, in the beautifully illustrated book which Lenoir fortunately 

 wrote, the history of his museum and the description of its 

 contents are preserved for us.* 



If we judge by the light of our own happier day, the idea of 

 dragging noble monuments from all parts of France to be set 

 up coldly in a Parisian museum, shorn of their historic associ- 

 ations and of their old artistic environment, seems close upon 

 a crime. Yet it is proved by almost every page of his book 

 that Lenoir was a man of artistic feeling, and especially by 

 passages like the one in which he says : " In spite of the mul- 

 tiplied protests of various artists, I have constantly solicited 

 the transport of monuments of the Middle Ages, which they 

 regarded as useless to the arts, and have succeeded in ob- 

 taining them." This is not merely to say that he was a more 

 wide-minded vandal than most of his contemporaries. The 

 Revolution had just spent its first fury, not only upon aristo- 

 crats and priests, but upon countless works of art which, in 

 the minds of the populace, were dishonored by their connec- 

 tion with aristocracy or priestcraft. Monasteries had been 

 confiscated and destroyed and their contents reduced to pow- 

 der. Churches were faring hardly better. Less damage was 

 done to the cathedrals of France, it is true, than had been 

 done, ■ by a more gradual process, to the cathedrals of 

 England during the Reformation and the long years of 

 indifferentism which followed it ; yet they were greatly 

 injured, while scores of other churches, sometimes of 

 equal size and beauty, had been secularized or torn stone 

 from stone. For years after Lenoir began to form his 

 museum the work of destruction went on, though in a 

 more legalized way. When Napoleon came with his strong 

 hand to enforce respect for art as well as for law, there was 

 less excuse for enlarging, or even keeping up, the museum. 

 But Napoleon's intense desire to enrich his capital may well 

 have encouraged the despoiling of his own provinces while 

 he was ravishing foreign lands. Lenoir tells us of the state 

 in which he found, for example, the famous Church at St. 

 Denis, "which the fire seemed to have devoured from the 

 crown of the vaults to the bases of the tombs," and of how he 

 rescued from these tombs " such debris as could be restored." 

 It is unquestionable that with all the harm he must have wrought 

 in transporting his monuments, and especially in restoring 

 them according to the skill of his unsympathetic time, he did 

 more good than evil, preserving, if in a mutilated state, many 

 things which would otherwise have perished, and, by the mere 

 formation of his museum, insisting upon the value of the art 

 of other days. 



Just now, however, I wish to speak not of the museum itself, 

 but of the so-called " Elys6e " which Lenoir connected with it. 

 The Maison des Petits Augustins, and even the street to which 



* Muse'e des Momt-mens francais, ou Description historique et chronologique des 

 Statues en marbre et en bronze. Bas-reliefs et Tombeaux des Hommes et des Femmes 

 celebres pour servir d V Histoire de France et a celle de VArt. Par Alexandre Lenoir, 

 Fondateur et Admbiistrateur du Muse'e. A Paris. [The first volume bears the date 

 1800, while the others were published from time to time down almost to the date of 

 Napoleon's banishment.] 



it gave the name, are now blotted from the map of Paris ; but 

 a hundred years ago it still had its old walled-in conventual 

 garden, and in this Lenoir established a sort of factitious ceme- 

 tery, naming it, in the classicizing spirit of the day, after the 

 " Elysian Fields" of the Greeks. Such an Elysium, he says, 

 seemed to suit the historical character which he had endeav- 

 ored to give his museum, although one hardly sees the con- 

 nection between a series of rooms filled with French monu- 

 ments chronologically arranged, and a cemetery in which he 

 strove to realize what he fancied to have been the idea of the 

 Greeks with regard to a future world ! However, his descrip- 

 tion is as charming as his cemetery must have been. " In this 

 calm and peaceful garden," he says, "one may see more than 

 forty statues ; tombs, placed here and there on the green turf, 

 lift themselves with dignity in the midst of silence and tran- 

 quillity. Pines, Cypresses and Poplars accompany them ; 

 small columns and cinerary urns, set on the walls, concur in 

 giving to this happy spot the sweet melancholy that speaks to 

 a sensitive soul. Here one finds the tomb of Abelard and 

 Heloise, upon which I have had engraved the names of this 

 unfortunate couple ; the cenotaphs and recumbent statues of 

 the Good Constable and of Sancerre, his friend ; in sarcophagi 

 executed after my plans and drawings rest the illustrious re- 

 mains of Descartes, Moliere and La Fontaine, and those of 

 Turenne, Boileau, Mabillon and Montfaucon. Further off a 

 column supports, in a vase, the heart of Jacques Rohault, wor- 

 thy rival of Descartes. Near this philanthropic heart one dis- 

 covers the modest and touching epitaph of Baptiste Brizard, 

 that favorite of Melpomene, who once made the stage of 

 France beloved." 



Thus Lenoir writes in the general introduction to his book, 

 and in the concluding volume a whole chapter is devoted to 

 the Elyse"e. Much of it is taken up with sentimental explana- 

 tions and reflections, but it also includes descriptions of some 

 of the monuments and tells whence a number of the relics 

 they enshrined had been brought— as the remains of Descartes 

 from Sweden, and the heart of Jacques Rohault from the 

 chureh of St. Genevieve, in Paris. This last fact certainly 

 proves that something of vandalism had crept into Lenoir's 

 original wish merely to preserve threatened treasures from 

 destruction. 



But our chief interest is with Lenoir's cemetery as a whole 

 and the manner of its arrangement. As he says nothing to the 

 contrary, he probably did not alter the disposition of the 

 monastic garden, but simply arranged his looted and newly 

 manufactured tombs among the Cypresses, Myrtles, Poplars, 

 Pansies, Violets and Rose-bushes, to which he constantly re- 

 fers as harmoniously surrounding them. His pictures show 

 us many of these, and, if the delineators were faithful, the 

 grouping of tall shafts with slender trees, and of lower tombs 

 with masses of shrubbery, must have been both tasteful and 

 effective. The most interesting, because most extended, view 

 is the one which, on a slightly smaller scale, is reproduced on 

 page 67. The monument in the foreground is that of Des- 

 cartes, and was a creation of Lenoir's own. But in the middle 

 of the picture we are delighted to recognize the famous statue 

 of "Diane chasseresse," which Jean Goujon modeled,' it is 

 said, from Diane de Poitiers herself, and which formed the 

 chief ornament of the cour d'Jionneiir in her chateau at Anet. 

 But for Lenoir this statue would have perished, as likewise 

 Goujon's splendid gates which now stand in the court-yard of 

 the Ecole des Beaux Arts ; and on the fountain pedestaf where 

 he placed the statue it stood somewhat as it had at Anet 

 (where its still loftier pedestal rose from the centre of a large 

 ornamental basin), and must have looked far better than 

 it does to-day near the eye in a small salon in the Louvre. 



Another glance at the picture will show the chief reason 

 why an account of Lenoir's Elyse"e is here in place. It is an 

 almost ideal picture of that natural aspect which we strive to 

 give our own cemeteries and which is generally thought a 

 distinctively American conception. Of course one dares not 

 speak too decidedly ; but it seems as though this Elyse'e may 



well have been the first realization of such a conception as 



though Lenoir had been the inventor of a scheme which, 

 probably in all ignorance of his ephemeral creation, has 

 since been so widely and variously elaborated in the New 

 World. And where have we improved upon his execution of 

 the scheme? Certainly not in our monuments themselves, 

 even if we judge by the most banale of those which he him- 

 self designed, and certainly not in their arrangement as re- 

 gards one another and the natural features associated with 

 them — a fact which would be still clearer could we show more 

 of the pictures in his book. Is not such an unsymmetrical yet 

 harmonious grouping as his far better than our usual attempts, 

 where we vibrate between a formality at variance with natu- 



